Hillary Clinton delivered a major speech on the Iraq War this morning. She didn't say anything groundbreaking, but the speech did provide her with a nice opportunity to reiterate her support for a sensible and well-planned withdrawal, the bread and butter of many Democratic voters. Here are chunks of a summary the Clinton campaign blitzed out to reporters.

The basics of her plan have been known for months:

As President, one of Hillary's first official actions will be to convene the Joint Chiefs of Staff, her Secretary of Defense, and her National Security Council. She will direct them to draw up a clear, comprehensive plan for withdrawal that starts removing our troops within 60 days...

Hillary knows that as we bring our troops and contractors home, we cannot lose sight of our very real strategic interests in this region. Al Qaeda terrorist cells continue to operate in Iraq, cells that did not exist before President Bush's failed policy. Under Hillary's plan the United States will retain counterterrorism forces in Iraq and the region to fight al Qaeda and will not permit terrorists to have a safe haven in Iraq from which to attack the United States or its allies.

According to the speech, Clinton will ensure that for every month a member of the military spends in the field, they get one month here at home. She will reign in the use of no-bid contracts and private contractors will get the boot:

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Obama went before reporters from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times on Friday and cleared the air on the Rezko situation in a big way. Here's the beginning of the Trib's write-up:

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama waited 16 months to attempt the exorcism. But when he finally sat down with the Tribune editorial board Friday, Obama offered a lengthy and, to us, plausible explanation for the presence of now-indicted businessman Tony Rezko in his personal and political lives.

The most remarkable facet of Obama's 92-minute discussion was that, at the outset, he pledged to answer every question the three dozen Tribune journalists crammed into the room would put to him. And he did.

You can read the whole thing here. It's pretty remarkable; it's the closest thing to an acquittal that the press can issue. The Obama campaign tried to use it to push the Clinton-as-serial-nondiscloser story line, immediately urging the Clinton campaign to match their moment of forthrightness by releasing all of Clinton's tax records, disclosing all of her earmarks, and making the donations to Bill Clinton's presidential library and foundation public.

I'm guessing the Clinton campaign will reject all three parts of that suggestion. The question is whether voters in Pennsylvania care. I'm guessing they are a little more worried about things like NAFTA, the economy, and the Iraq War. But that said, if Obama's push on the issue of disclosure reminds just a few people that they are tired of the Clintons and their drama, he might poke a few critical percentage points into his column on election night.

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From Jeffrey Klein, former Mother Jones Editor-in-chief:

Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum called me into his office late one morning in January of 1981. Several months earlier I'd written a cover story for Mother Jones predicting what the first four years of a Reagan administration would look like. As luck would have it, I'd gotten a jump on the national press corps, who initially thought this aging B actor didn't have a prayer of being elected president. But because Mother Jones was based in San Francisco, we knew that it was the country that needed to pray.

A sidebar in the Mother Jones' story had caused the sudden resignation during the Republican convention of Reagan's foreign policy advisor, Richard Allen. We'd exposed that Allen, while serving on Nixon's payroll, had simultaneously worked for Richard Vesco, then the world's biggest swindler.

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In 2000, Illinois resident Marvin Weatherspoon (right) got a Bank of America credit card that he used to consolidate $12,000 in home repair bills, thinking the 4.5 percent introductory interest rate would help him get out of debt faster. Instead, though, eight years later, he has paid the bank more than $15,000, yet has reduced his principal balance by only $800. The reason? Even though he's paid his bills on time, Bank of America inexplicably raised his interest rate, first to 19.99 percent and then to 25 percent, where it is today.

Weatherspoon came to Washington yesterday to tell his story at a hearing on the Credit Card Holders Bill of Rights, a bill sponsored by New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) that would restrict the kind of arbitrary interest rate increases Weatherspoon got hit with, among other things. But as it turned out, Weatherspoon never got to testify. The ever-powerful credit-card companies successfully bounced all of the consumers off the panel, leaving only academics and credit card executives to speak publicly.

At the outset of the hearing before a subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee, Maloney explained that "there have been fairness concerns raised about having consumers testify this morning without a waiver that allowed their credit-card issuers to respond publicly." Translation: The credit card companies wanted the consumer witnesses to make their financial records public so the banks could "rebut" their complaints, i.e., trash them in the press.

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